USS Texas And Mark Lardas

From the Normandy Invasion, to the Gateway Lunar project, Mark Lardas has the insider knowledge of the unique accomplishments ot Texas and Texans

Episode Transcript

(00:12):
Hi everyone, I'm Kati RHS SheriahFryer, and this is my heart of
Texas. As the Normandy invasion ofWorld War II marks its eightieth anniversary this

(00:42):
d Day, June sixth, wewanted to focus on the importance of Texas,
the USS Texas Battleship Texas and therole it played at Normandy. I
made the pilgrimage to those beaches witha group for the University of Texas five
years ago. Personal for me andthat my father was part of the invading

(01:02):
forces on Utah Beach, and personalin the emotion it aroused to see the
reverence still held in that place forthe Allies and making the assault, and
for the USS Texas in particular launchingvolley after volley to the entrenched German artillery
positions on the cliffs above. Howis it that a battleship commissioned in nineteen

(01:26):
fourteen would be the pivotal force innineteen forty four in France and within months
at both iwa Jima and Okinawa,and still endure as the heroic battleship Texas
that we retrofit and honor in Texastoday. I turned to a local expert
historian, prolific author, naval architect, current NASA engineer for our conversation,

(01:53):
and I think you'll find that Michigantransplant Mark Lardes, like the battleship itself,
are easily intertwined in my heart ofTexas. What is it that is

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so special about this particular battleship,if there's any way to encapsulate it,
Why is the battleship Texas something thatis beyond legendary. It is the last
remaining battleship from the era when battleshipsruled the oceans. It is what is

(02:39):
called a second generation grednot and thosewere the ships that fought the Battle of
Jutland, which was the largest surfaceaction ever fought. Now Texas wasn't involved
in that, but it was thesame generation as the flagships of the German
Navy and the Royal Navy that taughtthere. And there were several hundred dreadnoughts

(03:06):
built prior to nineteen twenty five,and the Texas is the only surviving example
of those ships. The last onesurvivor other than the Texas was the German
battle cruiser World War One battle cruiserGobin, which the Turks incorporated into their

(03:28):
navy, but they scrapped that innineteen seventy one. So for the last
fifty years that's Texas, is it. It's also an extremely lucky ship.
It suffered I think two casualties totalduring World War II, despite seeing a
lot of action at D Day,which is most famous for. Actually it

(03:52):
served in the Atlantic from before ourentry into World War Two until late summer
in nineteen forty four, and thenit went on from there to serve in
the Pacific during the worst of theComakazi campaign and suffered no casualties during that

(04:13):
period when other ships were being devastatedby the Kamikazis. I mean, a
good example would be the carrier Franklinlost a good third of its crew killed
in fires caused by a Comakazi hit, but Texas managed a cruise through all
of that. This was a OkinawaI believe, was that where there were

(04:35):
battle stations for fifty straight days aboardthe Texas and Okinawa, Yes, but
it was also at ewer Jima sawthe flag race. Yeah. So the
thing is that that's not the onlything that Texas went through. Texas participated
in the Veracruz campaign in nineteen fourteen. It was one of the US dreadnoughts

(05:00):
battleships that were sent to England tojoin the Grand Fleet at scap Flow and
actually led the fleet in an actionagainst the German High Seas Fleet in nineteen
eighteen. The Germans saw the Britishcoming and turned and ran, but so
there wasn't any gunfire exchanged, butTexas was leading the church. It was

(05:24):
a very lucky ship, is whatyou said. I know that they the
Texas actually had what a dud shelland artillery shell or something. Tell me
about that. Yes, after theNormandy invasion about two three weeks later,
they were providing gunfire support at Shareboard. Now the Germans had several batteries there

(05:46):
and one of them fired a ninepoint two inch shell which struck Texas and
it was a high explosive shell,but it was a dud. It ended
up hitting an officer's stateroom destroyed thatbut it didn't kill anybody and it didn't
explode. And that shell was photographedafterwards and they kept it and while Texas

(06:15):
was on display at Santra Cental Park, they had the shell in the theater
room with an explanation of it.I know the shell has been preserved.
I'm equally certain it's not on boardTexas right now because it's undergoing a refit
right But when they do put ondisplay again, I'm sure that that will

(06:35):
be prominently displayed. So, inessence, the battleship Texas, the USS
Texas, it became something of alucky charm itself, didn't it when it
was engaged with other ships in battle. Is that where the motto come on
Texas came from. I think thatactually was more of a sport motto because

(06:59):
the back in the twenties they hadcompetitions between the various battleships and now now
that's a get ball game. Yeah, basketball, baseball, boxing matches,
they were really, really big.I've got some photos of boxing matches that
were held on the Texas. Youknow. The thing is the Texas is

(07:23):
managing a number of other firsts.It was the first ship that they launched
an aircraft from after World War One, yep. And it was also extremely
fortunate to be preserved. It wastoo old to keep. And the thing

(07:44):
is all of the battleships that werenewer than it went into reserve. And
then we're scrapped in the late nineteenfifties. All of the ships that were
older than it ended up being expendedat the Bikinia Tall Atomic Tests, and
Texas was the only one that wasleft. And part of that was because

(08:05):
the State of Texas decided they wantedit, and the Navy allowed or loaned
the ship to the state, andthey brought it here in nineteen forty eight
and put it on display, andit's been on display ever since except for
two refit periods, the second ofwhich it's going through right now. And

(08:28):
it's actually been a museumship about twiceas long as it was an active worship.
Rightly, this fondness that Texans havefor this battleship. I mean,
nineteen forty eight, school children weresaving their pennies in order to help preserve
the Texas. I remember back inthe early eighties again with that retrofit,

(08:50):
how people were stepping forward and tryingto help out. And even today with
this retrofit again, Texans who werethey're selling one inch square pieces of steel
that were going to be flown overNormandy next week, and I guess that
flight got canceled, but they're stillselling those pieces of steel. I mean
one inch piece of steel from theHall of the Texas for five hundred bucks,

(09:13):
and I bet you they sell alot. I bet you they will.
That's not unusual. When I wasin my teens, I had a
friend whose parents had an ink bladdermade from the wood of the Constitution that
was similarly sold to raise funds fora refit in the nineteen thirties. I
interrupted you. You were getting readyto say something when you were sixteen,

(09:35):
and I'm so sorry I interrupted you. Well, I was saying that.
When I was a teenager, Ihad a friend whose parents had an ink
bladder made from the wood of theConstitution the sailing frigate that's in Boston,
and they were refitting it, andthey sold pieces of the wood in the

(09:56):
same way they're selling those one inchsquares of steel well, to raise funds
for the refit. So people wantto hold a piece of history. That's
the attraction of that steel. There'ssomething about the sea though, sailors,
sailors, superstitions, sailor at theheart of the sea. So many things

(10:18):
still unknown about the sea. There'sa romanticism, I think even about these
tools of war. If you wouldthat somehow makes them romantic and lovable.
It's a show, after all.What's funny is most modelers make ship modelers

(10:39):
make models of warships and doesn't matter. I mean anything from a Greek galley
to the latest aircraft carrier. Andthe people that make models of sailing ships,
their best sales are warships rather thanclippers or commercial vessels. There's something

(11:01):
very powerful about those ships. Thething is that it's fitting that Texas should
honor the battleship because so much ofTexas's destinies were determined by the sea.
People think of Texas as cattle andcowboys and cotton and oil, and that

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it's all land based. But forthe first two three hundred years of Texas
history, from the time that CabasaDevaca was shipwrecked on Matagorda Island to about
the eighteen seventies, about the onlyway you could reach Texas with a large
amount of goods or export stuff outof Texas was by sea. Galveston was

(11:50):
in many ways the heart of Texasbecause that's how you got everything out of
the state. And what I findfascinating is that the influence of the sea
on Texas is very subtle. Mostpeople miss it. Most people don't understand
that the Port of Houston today isone of the largest and most important seaports

(12:13):
in the United States. I thinkit's the fourth largest in terms of tonnage
shipped in and out, and stuffcomes to that from virtually everywhere east of
the Rockies and west of the MississippiRiver. It ends up being funneled through
the Port of Houston, and itprovides a tremendous amount of jobs in this

(12:35):
country, in the state. Butit's more than that. There's an extensive
offshore industry with petroleum, and althoughthat was started in Louisiana, there are
extensive offshore wells in Texas. There'salso the fishing and shrimping industry. So

(12:56):
a lot of Texas even today isinfluenced by the sea. It was even
more influenced by the sea in theeighteen hundreds. The thing is that when
Santa Anna marched an army across thedesert from Mexico to into Texas, he
could march it there, but hecouldn't keep it there without supply from the

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sea, and the Republic of Texashad put together a navy which essentially kept
him from recent line his army rightand after San Jacinto, he ordered his
chief subordinate, Ouria, to keepthe army there. But the a combination

(13:41):
of the Texas Navy and the TexasRangers captured the three supply ships that were
supposed to provide food for Oia's army, so he just marched them back to
Mexico. And that was in eighteenthirty six. And the central government ended

(14:01):
up invading Texas several times before itwas annexed into the United States, and
each time it failed because they couldn'tmaintain the army in Texas without supply from
the sea. And then the finaltime that they tried to invade Texas,
what they did was the Yukaton wasin rebellion against the central Mexican government,

(14:26):
so they were going to conquer thatand then used the ships from the Yukaton.
This was the cargo ships to supplyan army and landed on the Texas
coast and the Texas Navy, underthe command of Edwin Moore, disobeyed orders
from Sam Houston, who was thenagain President of the Republic of Texas,

(14:48):
sailed down to the Yukaton and foughtthe Mexican navy in the only battle where
wooden sailing ships fought steel called steamshipsand one. Oh, I mean,
that is a real Texas story.If you think about it, that's like
some kind of what the difference ofmaneuverability. The thing is that a steamship

(15:13):
can ignore the wind, and windis very limiting to a ship. The
other thing is that the Texas thatalthough both sides had shells, a steel
hulled ship is better protected from anexplosive shells. Ten years later, the
Russian Navy would blow apart the Turkishnavy at Sinope using explosive shells against wooden

(15:39):
ships. In this case, thedifference between the two navy was the fact
that the Texas ships had fairly welltrained crews and the Mexican captains were both
brent new and didn't know how touse their ships. Okay, so let
me get this straight. Who hadthe wooden ships and who had the steamship?
Exans had the wood Okay, that'swhat I was thinking from the right,

(16:03):
and the Mexicans had two steamships,one of which was iron hauled,
and they should have cleaned up theTexans. But the Texas Navy won in
the battle chased off the Mexican Navywarships shades of swamp fox or something,
I mean really yeah, and itallowed the Republic of the Yukon to survive

(16:23):
for one more year, and inthat period the United States the next Texas,
so it was now part of theUnited States. And now we're going
into or will be going into,what becomes the Mexican American War, which
started as a border dispute whether Texasborder was the Nuaitas River or the Rio

(16:45):
Grande. Yeah, the Nuezias Strip. That was a very lawless part of
Texas until that was finally settled,wasn't it by war? Yeah, well
even after that because it was apretty they are an area and there really
wasn't much recent settle it. Sothat's where outlaws go. They go to

(17:07):
the frontier, and it ended upbeing a pretty wild area until well after
the American Civil War. I wantto talk a little bit about you because
I found you because you know somuch about the history not just of the
battleship Texas, but of boats andships and the sea and sailing. Hold

(17:30):
it right there. How did thisman from Michigan become the Texan he is
today? And how did his seafocused credentials ultimately launch him to NASA and
the Lunar Gateway program today only inTexas, and we'll be right back with
that. You seem to know everythingabout history anything that has to do with

(18:15):
the sea and the boats. Howin the world have you accomplished this?
Well, I can't claim to knoweverything. I can say, kids,
I can't say I know a lotabout a whole bunch of different stuff,
and part of it is always beenfascinated by the sea. I grew up

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in Michigan, and people may thinkthat that's a long way from ships in
the ocean, but Michigan is surroundedby the Great Lakes and those are connected
to the sea by the St.Lawrence Seaway, so you get ocean going
ships going as far north far inas Duluth, which is probably as far

(19:00):
from the sea as you can get. But my grandfather, actually both grandfathers
came from Greece. But my father'sfather came from an island called Icaria,
which is off the Turkish coast.It's part of Greece, and it's named
for Icarus, who was the sonof Fedalus, who, according to legend,

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built pairs of wax wings for himselfand his son and used them to
escape from Crete to Anatolio, whichwas in a Greek land, and his
son is supposed to have flown tooclose to the sun and had the wax
melt the feathers off his wings andcrashed into the sea near the island that

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now bears his name. And mygrandfather his family owned a sailing bark that's
a ship that's rigged similar to thelitt Okay, and they used to sail
the thing from Istanbul to Parias,which is the harbor of and then down

(20:10):
to Alexandria and then back up toIkaria. And when I was growing up,
my grandfather would tell me tales ofbeing on the ship. At one
point he fell off the main yardunfortunately landed in the water. Because we'd
landed on I wouldn't be here,But those stories fascinated me as child.

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My dad was very much into ships. He made model sailing ships. I've
got a model of the Revel,model of the Constitution that he built back
in the nineteen seventies, I thinkseveral others, and so that ended up
being passed on to me. AndI was always a history buff even in

(20:59):
grade school. Thing that really reallyfascinated me, and naval history in maritime
history was the stuff that I foundmost interesting, So I just read an
awful lot about it, and asI grew older, it wasn't just the
battles that fascinated me. It wasthe role that ships played in commerce even

(21:23):
something take the shipping container. That'sa story that absolutely fascinates me, and
it's one that has Texas roots becausethe first load of shipping containers was unloaded
at Port of Houston, and youhad this guy that had a trucking company

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that was trying to figure out away to ship cargoes without having to unpack
his trucks. So the first thingthat he tried was just putting the whole
trailer around the ship. But theproblem is that the road here with the
wheels and stuff, took up toomuch space. So then he created this

(22:06):
shipping container that would fit in theback of the flat bed truck and tried
shipping them on a modified tanker.He originally planned to ship them out of
the Port of New York, butthat was unionized and they wouldn't let him
do that because if this worked,it threatened the jobs of lots of longshoremen.

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So he shipped them out of anon union port in New Jersey,
and he was shipping them to Texas, and Galveston was unionized. They wouldn't
let the ship unload there, butpart of Houston wasn't, or rather had
terminals that weren't, so they unloadedit there and as a result, Houston

(22:49):
ended up being one of the firstcontainer terminals in the world. And the
thing about the container is it droppedthe car lost of shipping by ninety seven
percent. What cost you a dollara pound, or what cost you a
dollar to ship previously now cost onlythree cents, and you can imagine what

(23:15):
that did to really the world economy. The only reason we can buy shirts
from Indonesia is because you can shipthem to anywhere in the world for almost
nothing, pretty much the cost ofthe fuel. And so the thing is
that at first he did this innineteen fifty five, and even up until

(23:37):
the early seventies, there were alot of people that were saying that this
was just a passing fad. Iwas getting a degree in the architecture University
of Michigan at the time, andthat's one of my professors told me that
this is going to pass, andeveryone at first thought that, oh,
this is the shipping equivalent of airmail, so we're going to send our expensive

(24:02):
cargoes by using containers. And thenit finally dawned on everyone that this craps
the cost for everything. It makeseven more sense to ship cheap cargoes by
container. But again, that's aTexas story. You wouldn't think it because
it caused a worldwide revolution. Traditionalport like Liverpool, London, New York

(24:26):
City, San Francisco all died becausethey didn't want containers until it was too
late. They didn't innovate, andnow we see them on rail cars holding
up traffic. Oh endless, endlessshipping containers on rail cars coming out of
the border of Houston. Oh yeah, yeah. It's like I said,

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it's the fourth largest port in theUnited States, and it provides good jobs.
And the op readers of those cranesget paid a whole lot more than
the longshoreman did. Because that's anexpensive piece of machinery. You want to

(25:10):
make sure that the people that areoperating it are reliable, so you know,
will you pay more? I getit. Now, this seems to
be the appropriate time to ask,how does the guy who with the naval
engineering degree from Michigan end up sucha proud Texan and we should reveal to

(25:33):
people what it is that you dotoday in addition to all of your extensive
writings and books and knowledge of history. Well, there's a funny story in
that. The thing is, Iwas growing up. I grew up an
innurban Michigan, and I swore Iwas going to go anywhere to college but

(25:56):
an arper because that's where the Universityof Mechigan is, because I wanted to
get out of my hometown. Exceptit turned out that Michigan had the best
engineering school in the state and reallyone of the best in the nation.
So I bet the bullet and wentto Michigan. At the time, Michigan
was really a space crazy town.When I was in grade school and junior

(26:25):
high we tracked astronauts the way thatkids around the rest of the country track
baseball stars. And part of thatwas that Michigan at the time was involved
in the Mercury program. And whenI was in cub Scouts, John Glenn
came to visit my Scout troop.I thought at the times that's because he

(26:48):
was going around visiting all of cubScout troops, but it was more likely
because Professor Harm Buning had a sonin the cub Scout pack, and Glenn
did this as a favorite him becausehe and Buning had worked together on the
Mercury program. So I'm really interestedin space. But by the time I

(27:10):
am ready to go to college,and despite my interest in history, I
decided I was going to become anengineer because I decided I would rather make
history than simply write about it,So an engineering seemed to be the place
to do it. Except aerospace wasgoing through one of its periodic crashes in

(27:36):
nineteen seventy three when I started college, so I decided to go into naval
architecture instead of aerospace because that seemedthe more reliable industry, and besides,
you could make a lot of historythat way too, Except I ended up
getting various jobs in college computers andthey were always on NASA contracts. Don't

(28:03):
ask me why, it just happened. And then when I graduated in seventy
nine, I was doing the recruitingcircuit at the placement Center at Michigan,
and back then they would post allof the interviews coming up on the wall
and you could sign up for themand they would highlight the various majors.

(28:26):
And there was somebody visiting from LockeElectronic Company in Houston at JSC and naval
architects were highlighted. And I lookedat that and I said, why in
the world would they need naval architects. I mean, the shuttle hadn't flown
yet, but I knew that thatwas landing on a runway. They didn't

(28:48):
need a splash down space capsule anymore, so why do they need naval architects?
And having a curiosity bump the sizeof a goose egg, I decided
the only way I would find outwas to interview with them. So when
the time for the interview came,I sit down and the recruiter looks at

(29:12):
my resume and says, you know, you've got kind of an interesting background,
and I said, well, yes, but they had naval architects highlighted.
So I was curious as to whyLockeyed in Houston wanted a naval architect
He said, well, it's gotto be a mistake. We've got a
shipyard in Washington State, so somebodyin the placement office had made a mistake.

(29:33):
So I looked at him, andhe looked at me, and I
said, look, we're both here. Let's see what we have to offer.
So he goes through and starts givingme his spiel about what we would
be doing, which was dynamic analysisof the Space Shuttle. That's what his
group did, and more particularly vibrationanalysis because they wanted to make sure that
the thing didn't shake itself apart duringlaunch. And he goes out part of

(29:57):
a vibration matrix and leaves it unfinishedand shows it to me, and I
realized that that was the same typeof vibration matrix we'd covered in my ship
dynamics class the previous day. Sowhile he's talking, I'm filling out the
blanks because it's obvious, at leastto me, what the blanks should be.

(30:22):
And he notices this. He takesit, he looks at it,
and then he says, you cando this, And I said, oh,
yeah, we covered this in oneof my classes yesterday. This is
simpler. It's just so improbable thatit absolutely has to be true. These
kinds of things happen in this state. I don't know why, but they

(30:45):
do. Any rate. It turnedout to be the best offer that I
got, and I learned later onthat they were absolutely desperate for people because
everyone had gotten burned so badly inseventy seventy four. They were hiring people
with education degrees because Texas still hadeducation degrees back then, with math majors,

(31:11):
because they were so hard up fortechnically trained people. I discovered that
my Michigan degree was worth about extrafive hundred a year because I came from
a prestige school, and that doesn'tsound like much today, but that was
about a ten percent premium. SoI figured, oh, I'll go down
to Texas for a couple of years. They've got a big offshore industry.

(31:34):
I'll work in the space program fora couple of years, and then I'll
switch back to offshore in naval architectureand dine out in the fact that I've
been a rocket scientist for the restof my life. Except it turned out
that it was pretty interesting, andafter a couple of years at switch to
a small company called Intermetrics, wherewe were doing navigation analysis that was,

(32:00):
at least to me, that wasa whole lot more fun than the vibration
analysis. They were actually plowing thecourse that the shuttle would fly, and
in this job it wasn't real timenavigation because we still hadn't flown, but
rather it was doing analysis of howthe navigation would perform. But then in

(32:24):
eighty three I ended up getting ajob at McDonnell Douglas doing actual Shuttle navigation,
and I was a Shuttle navigator forthree years, working in the back
room of mission control at the navconsole, and in many ways that was

(32:45):
the greatest job ever because I waspart of the whole Shuttle program and in
eighty three it was new and shiny, and we were going to go on
from there, maybe to the Moonsomeday. Soon the company I was working

(33:06):
with lost the contract for mission controlto another company, and I decided to
stay with McDonald douglas and doing navigationanalysis. And the last mission that I
supported in mission control was the oneimmediately before Challenger. Oh. If I

(33:29):
had stayed with the ground NAP groupand gone over to the other company,
I probably would have been standing behindthe high speed nav people at launch working
the first orbit nav shift a Challenger, But because I had switched to another

(33:49):
group within McDonald Douglas, I wasspared back. Because I was I was
actually I was senior enough by thatpoint with three years experience, that's probably
where I would have been, becauseI was the lead navigator on the mission
before that. I'm not sorry Imissed that. I really am. But
you didn't miss it, I meananybody. I was a reporter. I

(34:14):
remember where I was. I remembereverything about it. Columbia two. Everyone
does everyone, and same with Columbia. Yeah, it's very personal to us.
Yeah, but it's like I said, I'm glad I wasn't in mission
control when that happened. It wasbad enough being at the tower one McDonnell
Douglas and watching that launch, andI remember it went home that day and

(34:38):
they kept replaying the launch and damnit if it didn't happen every time they
replayed it instead of the thing gettinginto space. Yeah, but I remember
finally saying, we're not going todo this anymore. We're not going to
play this anymore. It's just toodevastating to see it over and over and

(35:00):
over again. Yeah. The thingis that, of course they went into
that three year, two year hiatusfinding out it was wrong. Yeah,
what went wrong? Right? Soit was a good thing I'd shifted out
of mission ups and we were doingnavigation analysis for future missions and some really

(35:22):
really cool stuff. I did someof the initial independent validation and verification for
what was called the tethered satellite mission, where you're reeling out a five hundred
pound ball twelve and a half milesfrom the Shuttle, and from a navigator's
standpoint, that's a really really fascinatingmission, marvelous exercise in orbital mechanics,

(35:50):
and I got to do the analysisof it. I ended up doing some
work on interplanetary navigation, didn't amounttoo much, and then ended up working
and the Space Station Freedom when westill had Space Station Freedom, and then
they canceled that program and i'd justgotten them on MBA, and I decided
that space was just too cyclical andit was time to move into something finally

(36:15):
move into something else, and Ichose e commerce, and well, that
was in ninety four, and itwas a rocket ride for the next six
and a half years, and ofcourse you ended up with a big dot
com bust and the program I wasworking on ended at the end of September
two thousand and one, and wethought they might extend it a year,

(36:38):
but then nine to eleven happened,and the money that was funding our program
was DoD and they had better usesfor it than supporting a new e commerce
system. So I suddenly found myselfunemployed and looked for something, anything for
the next nine months, and thenwas lucky enough to have somebody that I

(37:05):
had ended up helping. When McDonnellDouglas lost the contract, we went from
twelve hundred people to three hundred people, and I ended up being one of
the few that stayed. But Iended up helping a lot of my friends
and said I'm a good writer workon their resumes. And apparently I didn't
even remember this. Apparently I hadhelped this one guy with his resume and

(37:30):
we argued about some of the changesand I told him put it in and
he did, and he ended upgetting hired by NASSA, and about a
year later he asked why they hiredhim, he said, we liked your
resume. So after that he reallyhad pond memories of me. And then
he learned I was out of workand told me let me know what jobs

(37:52):
I was applying for and he wouldget me the name of the hiring manager.
And it turned out the hiring managerfor one of them was someone that
I had worked for in the past, and they were looking for someone with
exactly my skills. And I calledhim up and introduced myself and he remembered
me, and he said, so, what's going on. He says,

(38:13):
well, I understand we each havea problem. Well what's that? And
I said, you're looking for peoplethat can work on the shuttle. I
said, yeah, that's true.Well I'm looking for a job. Let's
see what we can how we couldhelp each other. And it turned out
he'd seen my resume, but becauseI'd been out of the industry for eight
years, had thought I wasn't serious. This was back when they were first

(38:37):
having the electronic recruiting right, andbasically you put out a position, you'd
end up getting a couple of hundredresumes and you'd filter out all of them
that had been out of the industryfor more than two or three years.
Yeah, kind of like AI today, like AI today. Any rate,

(39:02):
So we did an interview and Iended up back at Boeing, or ended
up at Boeing which had bought McDonalddouglas. So in a since I was
returning to McDonald douglas doing rendezvous navigationanalysis for the shuttle, after each mission.
Of course, they were doing alot of rendezvous missions. Now.

(39:22):
The thing is that was the really, really, really hot topic in navigation
back in the nineteen eighties when Iwas working for McDonald douglas. But I
never managed to do any of thatbecause everyone else wanted to do it,
and people with better qualifications than mealways got the job. So this was

(39:44):
like by the nineteen nineties. Bytwo thousand and two, it was all
taped. So I did that untilthe Shuttle program ended. So at that
point there really wasn't much demand forspace rendezvous navigation software engineers, so I
wasn't even going to try and dothat, and instead asked myself three questions,

(40:08):
what am I good at, Whatdo I enjoy doing, and what
pays well. The intersection of thosethree things ended up being technical writing.
I liked writing and I was goodat it, And it's amazing how few
good technical writers there are out there. Engineers as a group tend not to

(40:30):
be particularly good writers. If youhave any skills in engineering and you can
write well, you can pretty wellwrite your own techt It's a rare skill.
So I ended up getting a jobat a oil well drilling manufacturing company.
Was there for three years, endedup working for a apartment management company

(40:54):
documenting software. Ended up working ata company building a self driving airliner.
They were putting an electric motor inthe nosewheels so it could taxi autonomously.
Ended up just doing technical writing andall sorts of things, writing manuals and

(41:15):
how to run super tankers, crewdeoil trading, all for different companies,
and by twenty twenty one I wasworking for a company that was documenting call
center software. It was interesting forthe first six months, but let's face
it, no one wants their kidsto grow up and work in a call

(41:35):
center, and by now you're wellgrown, and any technical writing in a
new field is interesting. And thenin June I got this call from a
recruiter wanting to know if I wouldbe interested in working on a lunar program.
Now, remember I've been out ofaerospace away from NASA for ten years

(42:00):
by this point, and more thanthat. The last time I was gone
for eight years, nobody was interestedin me because I'd been way too long.
So somebody calls me up and says, you want to work on a
lunar program, and my immediate reactionwas this is a prank phone call,
isn't it? And no, theyconvinced me they were serious. So I

(42:25):
filled out an application and darned ifthey didn't hire me. It turned out
the guy that ran the company andI had worked together at McDonald Douglas in
the eighties and he remembered me.So that's what you're doing. That's what
I'm doing now. I'm working ona program called Lunar Gateway, which is

(42:47):
a space station that will be orbitingthe Moon, except it won't be just
going around and around the Moon.It's going to be in this really really
funny orbit that does kind of afigure eight behind the Moon. So as

(43:08):
the Moon goes around, you've gotthe space station doing figure eight behind it,
kind of like a puppy that you'repulling on a leash. And it's
really really cool work. When Icame down here in seventy nine, my
wife and I were both big spacebuffs, so that's why part of the

(43:30):
reason why we wanted to try anddo this, And she ended up getting
a job as a mechanical assembler atLockheed and she actually built four of the
experiments that flew on a program calledthe Long duration exposure facility. Wow,
my father in law designed an instrumentflew on Galileo, and my oldest son

(43:52):
ended up being the integrator for theBeers satellite. I'm the only one in
the family that has gotten anything intoorbit. I would say, you've launched
an awful lot of writings. Ilooked on just the Apple website and there
were fifty books. Fifty all thebooks that you have authored, a lot

(44:14):
of them. Lots of photographs too, and I know that one of your
sons has helped you with those photographs. But just the range of your interest,
not just your knowledge, but yourinterest was a little bit overwhelming to
me. I thought, how doesthis man sleep? When do you get
this done? When I called youthis morning, you were just putting the

(44:35):
finishing touches on yet another article.So you're still writing technical articles and you're
still writing books. This is justa general article. And yes I'm writing
books. I do about four booksa year. But in my defense,
there are fairly short books, fifteenthousand to about thirty thousand words each.

(44:55):
Most of them are for a companycalled Osprey, which is known for doing
original artwork in the books. Andpart of what I have to do is
include instructions for the artists on eachone of these books, and you kind
of let your inter cecil be demill out on that. Although nobody nowadays

(45:20):
remembers who Cecil b. De millIs, but he was a producer that
would do these big, spectacular costumedramas. And I've often joked that writing
for Osprey is kind of like writingfor Playboy magazine, because everyone says they're
buying it for the great writing,but you know they're getting it for the
pictures. So okay, we're almostout of time. And truly I could

(45:45):
do about eight different podcasts with you, because you can take off and go
in so many different directions. Butwhile I'm here, I wanted to just
wrap up, maybe with a fewminutes talking about sunk ships in Texas.
I had no idea that we hadthat many lost vessels in and around Texas,

(46:07):
going all the way back to thefifteen hundreds. It followed my mind.
The most famous ones are probably thefifteen fifty four Wrecks, which was
a Spanish treasure fleet that sailed fromVeracruz to Havana and just as they reached
Cuba that got caught in a westerly, and three of the four ended up

(46:30):
wrecking on Corpus Christie and they wererediscovered in the middle of the twentieth century.
They found one of them dredging theManson Cut through South Padre Islands,
and yes, yeah, and theyended up getting a couple of coins,
some wood, and they found theanchor, but they destroyed everything else.

(46:52):
The second one was found by sometreasure hunters who just literally blew the wreck
in order to get the silver thatwas down there. They ended up getting
sued by the state and having toturn it over to the state because it
turns out that the state of Texasowns all of the shipwrecks along the Texas

(47:13):
Coast because it owns the land.It owns that offshoreland. It was it
was inherited from Mexico. The rightswere inherited from Mexico, which inherited it
from Spanish law, so it's uniquein the United States. And then the
third one was properly excavated. Itwas one of the first done, but

(47:34):
there's been there's a lot of stuffwhich focused on just the shipwrecks. The
other one was the forgotten Texas Coastand about half of that involved shipwrecks,
starting with Cavasa de Baca, endingup with as far as shipwrecks go with
LaSalle, and then it goes onto talk about some other aspects of Texas

(47:55):
Marathon history. You know, Iwas interested in prior to the United States
entering the Second World War, battleshipTexas was already in action in essence before
the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor and inthe Atlantic. But the Gulf of Mexico
and the German U boat activity,that's something that I don't teach a whole

(48:17):
lot about something that we might beOkay, I'm sure it happened, not
to the extent that you're able todescribe in your book. Yeah, there's
actually a really good book written bysomebody local called Thunder in the Gulf that
covered the whole German submarine activity inthe Gulf, And unfortunately her name slips

(48:38):
my mind, but taker said,it's a good book. I did have
a chapter about the U boats inthe Gulf of Mexico during World War two
and one ships they torpedo was aneutral Mexican cargo ship, and the sinking
of that was one of the thingsthat brought Mexico into the war against Germany.

(48:59):
So why they sank it is beyondme because they had a big Mexican
flag painted on it, which wasneutral and should have let them through.
Right. Well, human error ishuman error, and you certainly have been
able to witness it through your writing, through your books, and you're continuing
to make history, is I guesswas your original goal anyway? So do

(49:20):
you feel pretty good about how thingsended up, mister Michigander who's now mister
Texan. Yes, you do yourbest and you watch what happens over the
years, and somehow things have endedup pretty well. So it's kind of
strange. But yeah, I've stillgot a whole bunch of books that I

(49:42):
intend to write before I die.Unfortunately that list is getting longer each year.
And well that's a reason to keepon, isn't it. Yep,
it certainly is. But the thingis, I'm having too much fun at
the day job right now. Myoriginal plan was to retire and quit the
day job in January twenty twenty twoand right full time, but that was

(50:07):
before this lunar gateway job came along, and this has just been too much
fun. So the thing is thatI've got time to do both because the
kids are grown and on their own, and I'm on my own now because
my wife died six years ago,and keeping busy is the only thing that
keeps you from going crazy. Yeah. Well, I was going to say,

(50:30):
thinking you were going to retire,that ship sailed, but launching into
space, I see the symmetry there, the high seas and the seas of
the fifteen hundreds, all the waythrough to what is out there now and
what you're still a part of.I kind of think of anything that would
be more fun, more imaginative,and more fulfilling. Well you Fred Tennyson's

(50:54):
ulysses, haven't you? Yes?I have? Do you remember how that
ends? Come, my friends,tis not too late to seek a newer
world. Push off and sitting wellin order smite the sounding furrows from my
purpose holes to sail beyond the sunsetand the baths of all the western stars

(51:19):
until I die. It may bethat the gulfs will wash us down it.
Maybe we shall touch the happy aislesand see the great Achilles, whom
we knew. Though much has taken, much abides, and though we are
not now that strength which in theold days moved Earth and heavens that which
we are. We are when equaltemper of heroic hearts, made weak by

(51:45):
time and fate, but strong inwill to strive, seek to find,
and not to yield. I haveto say I didn't see that coming,
and then there was this. Iwill say Elon Musk is one of my
heroes because he's managed to reduce launchcosts by that same ninety seven percent that

(52:14):
mcclein lowered shipping costs with the shippingcontainer. So that's one reason we're doing
so much in space right now.It's cheaper to get there. Prolific in

(52:37):
thought, in words, interest andenthusiasm for possibilities. That's Mark Lardis.
You can dive into it yourself athis website marklards dot com. Mark with
A K L A R das dotcom. Thank you Mark for our budding
friendship, and thanks as always tonews producer Jeff Biggs and creative producer Jacob

(52:59):
Dantone you make each episode smoother.And thank y'all as always for listening.
I'm Sheriff Fryar with my heart ofTexas.